Electronics manufacturing tribology: Future opportunities and challenges

Electronics manufacturing is undergoing rapid transformation with advances towards the high intelligence, higher integration and nanodevices. The surface and interfacial related tribological issues during the electronic fabrication process have become one of the predominant factors affecting the production efficiency, products quality and performance of devices because the miniscule size of the newly developed devices is towards atomic scale. It poses a significant challenge for us to comprehensively understand the role of tribology during the electronic fabrication. The review paper proposes the concept of electronics manufacturing tribology. Afterwards, the inseparable development history of electronics manufacturing and tribology has been looked back. The important role of tribology on promoting the development of electronics manufacturing has been elaborated in detail. The review attempts to highlight the future opportunities and challenges of electronics manufacturing tribology in the last part. It is hoped that such a review will throw light on the future development of high-performance electronics manufacturing and enrich the micro- & nano- tribology fundamentals as well.